AtmosSci-Bench: Evaluating the Recent Advance of Large Language Model for Atmospheric Science

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), particularly in their reasoning capabilities, hold transformative potential for addressing complex challenges and boosting scientific discovery in atmospheric science. However, leveraging LLMs effectively in this domain requires a robust and comprehensive evaluation benchmark. Toward this end, we present AtmosSci-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess LLM performance across five core categories of atmospheric science problems: hydrology, atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric physics, geophysics, and physical oceanography. AtmosSci-Bench features a dual-format design comprising both multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and open-ended questions (OEQs), enabling scalable automated evaluation alongside deeper analysis of conceptual understanding. We employ a template-based MCQ generation framework to create diverse, graduate-level problems with symbolic perturbation, while OEQs are used to probe open-ended reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative LLMs, categorized into four groups: instruction-tuned models, advanced reasoning models, math-augmented models, and domain-specific climate models. Our analysis provides some interesting insights into the reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs in atmospheric science. We believe AtmosSci-Bench can serve as a critical step toward advancing LLM applications in climate services by offering a standard and rigorous evaluation framework. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/AtmosSci-Bench.